


Another Bend in the Road

by bookishandbossy



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Adventure, Donna-centric, Friendship, Gen, really just an ode to Donna Noble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 22:20:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8915194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: When Donna Noble is thirty-eight, she meets a man who has adventure tucked into his pockets.
When she is forty, she goes looking for him again.  And when she finds him, she decides that she's never letting go.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for doktrdonna on Tumblr for the DW Secret Santa.

When Donna Noble is six, she runs away to the seaside. Her mum has decreed that they're not going on holiday this year – “waste of money, anyway, shivering by the sea and getting sick off sugar”-- and so she packs her favorite sparkly blue suitcase and gets on a bus. Her mum and her grandfather come after her, of course, and when she gets home, there are rounds of endless questions and no dessert for a week. But for a minute, when she stands on the sand and looks out at the endless expanse of the sea, the taste of salt air sharp on her tongue, she feels something that she doesn't quite have the words for yet.

When Donna Noble is ten, she buys a map of the world and sticks a pin in it for every last place she wants to go. It's a forest of push-pins covering the globe and every last one is a different adventure. Her friends roll her eyes and ask her how she's going to get there.

When Donna Noble is fifteen, she talks her mum into letting her go to Paris on a school trip. She expects the Eiffel Tower and sidewalk cafes and handsome French men playing the accordion on street corners. She gets dirty streets and old French men grinning at her in the Metro and endless forced marches through the Louvre while their art teacher goes on and on about the Renaissance and keeps a gimlet eye on any girl thinking about slipping off. But on the last day in Paris, she wakes up earlier than anyone else and buys five macarons from the bakery on the corner. They taste like roses and pistachio and melt on her tongue as she watches the sun streak across the copper-topped roofs. Donna promises herself that she'll go back on her own someday. She never quite gets around to it.

When Donna Noble is thirty-eight, she meets a man who has adventure tucked into his pockets.

When she is forty, she goes looking for him again. And when she finds him, she decides that she's never letting go.

 

“So where do you want to go?” He spins around the TARDIS, pulling at levers and twirling knobs (she suspects that he's showing off for her, delighted to finally have someone to show off for again), hair standing up in tufts and generally looking like a bit like a prime idiot. Donna feels a swell of fondness for him, this complete madman whose grin seems to hold a thousand and one possibilities. 

“No aliens this time,” she says firmly. “No one spitting goo or anything like that. No spiders either.”

“You know, there's a very nice species of spiders over on Alpha Centauri. Fuzzy and everything. I had a lovely chat with them the other day,” the Doctor says thoughtfully and frowns down at a gauge that's spinning madly down from side to side. 

“No spiders,” she repeats and shudders at the memory of the rak—the roc—the big creepy crawly thing that wanted to use her to free her creepy crawly children. She'll take her aliens in any other shape from now on, thank you. “Have you got somewhere to plug in a coffee maker?”

“Just ask the TARDIS,” he says and waves a hand around vaguely at the golden walls. “If she likes you, she'll make up something for you. Your room'll be around somewhere here too.”

Donna gives the TARDIS a through lecture on what exactly she expects from a room—a proper bed, a large closet, no strange wires or gears anywhere—and the TARDIS complies to the letter. She's not sure if it likes her yet but she thinks that they'll come to a satisfactory arrangement. The floor beneath her feet radiates warmth up through her entire body in the mornings and the hallway from her room to the control room is always short and sometimes, when she leans against one of the walls, she can hear a faint whirring noise that almost sounds like a machine's version of purring. Donna thinks that maybe the blue box was lonely too. 

They go backwards and forwards in time and space, zigzagging back and forth wildly until she can't even remember what day of the week it is. They meet creatures that she doesn't even know how to describe and see stars that glow a deep purple and have tea with people whose names she's read in history books. They play an elaborate prank on the King of France that involves three high-strung King Charles Cavalier spaniels, a potted palm that keeps appearing and disappearing in the gardens of Versailles, and one very bored crown princess. (He's the one who suggests it but, to be fair, she's the one who rearranges the mirrors.) They talk with an extremely dignified alien species that communicates entirely through sounds that vaguely resemble small children blowing raspberries and she tries her hardest not to laugh. (She lasts until they're almost back to the TARDIS and then they both collapse in laughter on the ground.) They have a picnic on an alien planet, with sandwiches from her favorite place in Hampstead Heath that closed three years ago and a cheese from the future that he swears tastes just like sticky toffee pudding. (She tries a bite of it. It most definitely does not taste like sticky toffee pudding and she doesn't let him live it down for a good three weeks.) They run and run and run more than she's ever run before in her life. And she loves every last moment of it.

“Why did you start in the first place?” she asks him. “Why mess around with one of these and go zooming off into space?” 

“I wanted an adventure. That—that was a long time ago. Almost ten me's ago. I had this black coat and massive cravat back then and lots of white hair. Quite a strange face,” the Doctor says and scrunches his face up till she thinks his eyes might pop out.

“Are there pictures? A whole album full of strange men who pop around space interfering in people's lives? Did any of them have more than one suit?” she teases.

Eventually they flip through a series of photos on the TARDIS console, after he hits a few buttons, frowns down at the control panel, and eventually gives up and points the sonic screwdriver at it. They all look different on the surface—young, old, wearing striped scarves and leather jackets and vests with bits of celery stuck into them, smiling and frowning and peering through thin wire-frame glasses—but there's something that she sees in all of their eyes, wide and bright. He's been a very different man all these years but whatever it was that made him steal a time machine and run off to the stars is still there.

“What were you thinking with that outfit?” she asks, laughing, and points to a sweater vest covered with question marks.

“I quite like it,” he says indignantly. The next time they land, he tries to wear the sweater and she has to physically bar him from leaving the TARDIS with it on.

 

Donna makes him go for brunch with her in London, in between alien planets and saving various groups of people. (The TARDIS may be capable of doing a lot of things, but it makes terrible eggs.) She picks a place with five different kinds of pancakes and the Doctor asks for extra whipped cream and strawberries on top of his like he's five. (The waitress tries to give him her number anyway and Donna has to give her a stern look. He's got quite enough on his plate without aspiring actresses with pink hair flirting with him.) 

“We could have gone for pancakes on the other side of the galaxy, you know,” he tells her when they're walking along the South Bank afterward. “They do great space-berry waffles.”

“Space berries?” she shoots him a suspicious look.

“Absolutely. They taste a little like raspberries, a little like blackberries, a lot like custard...” He manages to keep a straight face for exactly three seconds before he bursts into laughter.

“Oy!” she shoves him. “I happen to like my pancakes very firmly human, thank you.”

They walk all around London that day. She takes him to the British Museum and he tells her all the ancient Greek gossip, he points out all the various places that aliens have popped up around the city, they eat their weight in scones and jam at tea, and she thinks that this is special too. They may not be saving any worlds or meeting people who speak new languages but this—wandering around the city, stopping whenever they like, talk flowing easily back and forth between them, watching his eyes light up whenever she shows him something new—is an adventure too. 

Later, it's the quiet things that she'll try to hang on to the hardest. The whoosh and the whir of the TARDIS around her, the swoop in her gut when they take off and go soaring into the universe. Watching the stars from her window, so close that she feels like she can reach out and touch them. Drinking tea in the control room of the TARDIS, him peering over a book written in elaborate symbols and her reading the mystery novel she made Agatha Christie sign. Collapsing in laughter over some stupid thing that she won't even remember five minutes later. The steadiness of having her best friend by her side.

The feeling she gets with him is the same thing she felt staring out at the ocean, or at the pins on her map, or the sun glancing off the top of the Eiffel Tower. Only it's a million times better. Because with the Doctor anything is possible. And sometimes anything is terrifying but that's all right. She'll take the monsters and the mystery and the endless running over a world without it. Because she's been in the heart of a volcano and she's spotted a giant wasp and she's talked with creatures straight out of a child's nightmare and she feels closer to the woman she's always wanted to be than she has in years.

For the first time in her life, she feels _important_. (What she doesn't know is that she already was.)

When it happens, when she begs him not to do it, the thing she can't bear the thought of is going back to her life the way it was before. Of going back to an endless succession of temp jobs and dates with the middle-aged sons of her mum's friends and of the sense that there's something more whipping around the corner too fast for her to catch it. Because she can't go back to that and the Doctor promises her that it won't be the same, but sometimes the Doctor can't keep his promises.

 

But he keeps this one. Or maybe she does. Donna applies for jobs when she gets home and gets one writing for a tiny travel magazine. Her writing isn't perfectly polished but it's sharp and funny and it sounds like something real. She spends late nights editing her prose and twisting her metaphors into shape and trading stories with her coworkers. She hikes across the Scottish highlands and eats dim sum in New York and tries to learn Swahili in Africa and sees marvels in the here and now. She goes star gazing with her grandfather. She moves into a new apartment and paints the walls bright colors. And out at a bar after the office Christmas party, she marches over to Shaun Temple and asks if she can buy him a drink. 

She's walking to her favorite cafe in Primrose Hill when she sees a strangely familiar man on the other side of the street. He's got a black leather jacket on and close-cropped blond hair and she could swear that she's never seen him before in her life but there's a grin on his face that tugs on some faint memory in the back of her mind.

She must remind him of someone too because he turns and stops in mid-step and stares at her from across the street. “Have I met you before?” he shouts. 

“ I don't think so. I'm Donna,” she tells him. “Donna Noble.”

“You know something, Donna Noble?” he says. “I think you're going to be _fantastic_.”


End file.
